• Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image.

The most famous ‘photomontage’ came during the mid-Victorian era. Then called “combination printing”, it was created by Oscar Rejlander, who was a pioneering photographer he one of the experts in the field. His 1857 collage photo ‘The Two Ways of Life was’ followed by the 1858 “Fading Away” by another artist, Henry Peach Robinson. By the end of the century, many other artworks came to life.

• For example: funny-looking postcards which often featured the wrong head stuck on a different body, or the creation of strange, impossible creatures.

In 1916, John Hartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, which nowadays is known as “Photomontage.” John Hartfield was the first person to use photomontage to tell a “story”. However the person who claimed that he and his companion, Hannah Hoch, “invented photomontage” was Raoul Haussmann.

In Hannah Hoch’s photomontages, she used other people’s visual elements to transform them into her larger pieces where these initially unrelated imagery would form insightful narratives. This is a strategy that many Dadaists and Surrealists have adopted. As she actively critiqued the society, her pioneering photomontage works often reflected gender issues and the woman’s role in a modern society.

By World War I, the method gained its first momentum, with photographers all over Europe producing postcards showing soldiers departing for battle with their loved ones seeing them off. More specifically, it was the Berlin Dada group that developed it as a tool of protest against the war and other political issues of the period, turning it into a proper modern art form.